Is social media; good or bad? Facebook is one of the original ones, but it has since been joined by Twitter and many others. Most of the time these can be a good thing, are fairly harmless, and keep people in touch with each other, but there are times when it isn’t. In this book Ronson meets and talks with those that have suffered from the overwhelming and brutal response from twitter, as well as other forms of public humiliation.

He starts with himself though. He is a bit of a twitter addict and on finding out that there was another @jonronson account, with a fondness for baking amongst other things, he started to do some digging. Turns out it was being run by a couple of guys as an experiment. He manages to meet them, mainly to see what was driving them, but also to persuade them to cease. This shocked him somewhat and into finding out what others had experienced. He starts with the ‘pop’ science writer Jonah Lehrer. It is an author that I have read before, and liked, but in one of his books a journalist noticed that some quotes didn’t ring true. After some correspondence with Lehrer, bordering on harassment at times, he publishes. Cue Lehrer’s career going down the pan, even more so when he makes a public apology on twitter.

There are other case studies in the book too; a PR executive, who just before getting on a plane to Africa made a tasteless joke about AIDS and Africa, a lady whose private photograph of her mucking around in a cemetery went viral, a software engineer whose innuendo laden joke about dongles in a private conversation at a tech developer conference offended a lady sitting in front of him. She posted a photo on twitter, and it went viral. All were sacked from their jobs. In a horrible reprisal the lady who posted it then suffered at the hands of the twitter mob, and lost her job too.

He interviews Max Mosley, better known as the ex boss of the FIA. The News of the World tried to shame him by releasing a film being ‘entertained’ by a number of dressed in military garb. He sued them and won, he has never felt any shame, but more importantly he hasn’t suffered from online humiliation unlike others. Ronson concludes that this is because for certain things a lot of people really don’t care. He starts to explore the darker side of this, and comes across a site called 4chan, where people’s desire for finding subjects to be offended by and extracting online revenge is rife. Very worrying stuff. He also talks to an American politician who has used shame as part of a punishment, he says this is limited to that individual and takes place in the local community affected by the crime, then it can have some effect in reducing re offending rates. But even this humiliation that now takes place now was considered excessive when you go back a couple of hundred years.

This public shaming of people, for what most sane people would consider just ill thought out comments or stupid lapses, is getting out of hand. The irony of it is that those doing the shaming are sometime equally guilty of crass, insensitive and downright horrid remarks; this once useful social tool is now a heavy blunt instrument. Ronson is a good journalist, and in this book he has had a long hard look at the way we use social media, the potential pitfalls and the potential jeopardy that we face in what we think are private offhand comments. This should be the start of the debate as to what is considered acceptable with regards to shaming of people, and also what steps well over the line when the online mob get started.